Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk was a gay rights activist, and the ﬁrst openly gay man elected to the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors. Randy Shilts’ biography The Mayor of Castro Street and Rob
Epstein’s ﬁlm The Times of Harvey Milk document Milk’s political rise within the context of
the development of the LGBT community. Like Harry Hay and Barbara Grier, Harvey Milk
was an individual whose personal life shaped his professional career. His drive to represent
a group of people who had been silenced and ignored made him a ﬁgure of national and
international standing. Milk became a visible symbol of the LGBT community’s emergence
as a political force. It is no wonder, then, that the grief caused by the assassinations of
Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Dan White uniﬁed the LGBT community as never
before. The lenient sentence that White received for the double murder resulted in a riot at
San Francisco City Hall. Daniel Nicoletta’s photographs of the White Night riots powerfully
capture the sheer force of the community’s outrage.

San Francisco Examiner, 1978Headline announcing Harvey Milk’s assassination
HARVEY MILK ARCHIVES–SCOTT SMITH COLLECTION
Elva Smith, mother of Milk’s partner Scott Smith, donated the Harvey Milk Archives/Scott
Smith Collection to the Hormel Center in 1996. The collection contains the personal and
political papers of Milk, the personal papers of Scott Smith, and the collection of the Harvey
Milk Archives and the Harvey Milk Estate. Milk’s political papers include hand-edited drafts
of his speeches, such as his famous 1977 speech "You’ve Got to Give ’em Hope," and his
writings, ofﬁce ﬁles, appointment books, and related ephemera from his campaigns.